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When Flour Power Invaded the Kitchen

''COOKING is easy,'' said Laura Shapiro, a food historian who is the author of ''Something From the Oven,'' published this month by Viking. It is about how in the 1940's and 50's the food industry tried to convince American women that cooking was difficult in order to persuade them that they needed newly developed packaged and frozen foods and cake mixes. And how women fought back.

Ms. Shapiro, 57, small and intense, was scuttling around her kitchen on the Upper West Side, making a ''Fluffy Two-Egg Yellow Cake'' from scratch, no mix, from a recipe in the ''Good Housekeeping Cook Book'' (1963). She is also the author of ''Perfection Salad'' (1986), about the home economics movement and creation of an American cuisine.

Ms. Shapiro was trying to show that baking a cake is easy. I was her student. I think cooking is hard. I have never baked a cake, and can tell when the roast is done because the fire alarm goes off.

''The kitchen has always been the place where housewives who feel inadequate must confront their own failings,'' she wrote.

Baking cakes is at the heart of her book: cake, she argues, is where the food industry did early battle for the hearts and minds of women. ''The American layer cake is a sign and symbol of more than dessert,'' she told me. ''It's your best work in the kitchen, the highest thing you can offer to someone you love, the most emotionally laden thing.

''I gave a talk on cake mixes to a woman's church group in Michigan,'' Ms. Shapiro continued. ''I asked them if they used cake mixes and how they felt about them.'' The guests described their problems and asked for guidance. ''People jumped out of their seats,'' she said. ''They poured their hearts out. It was like an A.A. meeting.''

Ms. Shapiro was measuring the flour in a cup. ''I had to go to two stores to find cake flour,'' she complained.'' They all had thousands of mixes. ''You don't need a sifter,'' she explained, using an ordinary strainer.

Ms. Shapiro writes that the food industry's hunger for women's grocery dollars was partly spurred by a decrease in flour sales. The decline began after World War I, when many women stopped baking because of the work involved, and bought packaged bread instead.

Companies like General Mills and Pillsbury tried various strategies to increase flour sales, she said. One was the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest, invented by the Leo Burnett advertising agency in 1949. That year, a hundred finalists marched into the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, which had been outfitted with 100 electric ovens. The baking began. The winner, Theadora Smafield, from Detroit, received a $50,000 check from Eleanor Roosevelt for her No-Knead Water-Rising Nut Twists. Pillsbury estimated that the event attracted 700,000 new customers.

But it wasn't enough, Ms. Shapiro said, and soon the companies were selling cake mixes -- everything needed in a box: sugar, shortening, flour, dried eggs. Just add water. Before World War II, a variety of cake mixes were introduced. But women were not impressed, and sales remained shallow. It took an Austrian consumer psychologist, Ernest Dichter, to figure out why, Ms. Shapiro writes. In research for General Mills, he discovered that women felt guilty about using the mixes and simply adding water and stirring. With the mix, she put nothing of herself in it. His solution was to give her something to do to feel creative. Leave out the dried eggs. Let her crack fresh eggs into the mix. (Fresh eggs, of course, resulted in better cakes.) After the war ended, with Dichter's advice in hand, General Mills reformulated its mixes. Sales improved.

Ms. Shapiro's book describes how advertisers, to help sell the mixes, bombarded women with rhetoric that implied that cooking was drudgery and time-consuming.

To give the industry a human face, companies invented fictitious experts, including Ann Pillsbury of Pillsbury and Betty Crocker of General Mills, who advised customers. ''Much of the guesswork is gone from cooking,'' Ms. Crocker advised in 1954 in an ad for angel food cake mix. ''Kitchen time is cut way down. By the ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods.'' The industry used the same techniques to sell frozen and packaged foods.

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Enormous sums had been invested during World War II in new technology for dried and frozen foods for the troops. ''Foods formerly manufactured solely for Army use will now be put on the civilian market,'' American Cookery magazine said in 1946. There were indestructible luncheon meats such as Spam and canned deep-fried hamburgers to market. Manufacturers developed dehydrated wines and frozen coffee, prepackaged in paper cups, each holding an ounce of frozen coffee extract -- just add boiling water.

First they had to be convinced they wanted them, Ms. Shapiro says, and food writers helped change their minds. Ms. Shapiro points to Elizabeth Gordon, who was the editor of House Beautiful magazine. ''Eating well no longer means drudgery in the kitchen, though millions of women have not yet discovered this fact,'' Ms. Gordon wrote in 1951. ''We have been slow to coordinate into our lives all the new homemaking inventions and food improvements of the last 20 years.''

Some went further, Ms. Shapiro says, sounding like ad copywriters. As Poppy Cannon wrote in her ''Bride's Cookbook'' (1954), ''All the really fine prepared stews, soups, sauces, and quick-frozen specialties have been made from the same ingredients that you would use, and with the addition of time, art, and skill.''

To promote packaged foods, the industry created recipes such as coleslaw with canned fruit cocktail, sweet potatoes stuffed with peanut butter, frozen lemonade salad dressing. A Heinz recipe for meringue called for a quarter cup of ketchup folded into beaten egg whites.

Women bought some frozen and packaged foods because of their low prices, Ms. Shapiro says, and because of their convenience. The foods were useful for a quick meal -- for children when parents went out, for instance. But products that were supposed to set women free -- frozen and prepackaged entrees and desserts -- remained on the margins of cooking and never completely replaced home cooking.

Indeed, a survey by the Department of Agriculture, which ran from 1959 to 1960, found that packaged foods accounted for only 14 cents for every dollar spent on food.

Still, the battle lines were drawn. It took two seminal developments to begin to counter the undermining of the American kitchen by industry, Ms. Shapiro writes. In 1963, Julia Child's ''French Chef'' made its debut on public television, and not long after Betty Friedan's ''Feminine Mystique'' was published. Both caught on like wildfire. ''At first this seemed contradictory,'' Ms. Shapiro told me. ''But then I understood. Betty Friedan was telling women they could take charge of their own lives. Julia Child was telling women that could take charge of dinner. It was the same message.''

Ms. Shapiro was asked about the future. ''You can cook sometimes -- or never,'' she said. ''Life is set up for all possibilities. That's going to be the future.''

But there is bad news as well, Ms. Shapiro said. What happened in the 50's continues today, she said. In great measure, the food industry still governs people's lives, she said. ''They are busy trying to co-opt the organic food movement,'' she said. ''You can buy organic boxed macaroni and cheese, junk food. We've handed over our children to the food industry to raise,'' she continued. ''We trusted the food industry to take care of us. Guess what? That's not what they do. They are in the business of making money.''

Ms. Shapiro pulled her cake from the oven and gently prodded it. ''It's pulling away a bit from the sides,'' she said, ''but springing back when you touch it.'' She had made frosting from melted chocolate and sour cream; now she spread it on. Delicious. The sour cream gave the chocolate a tangy taste, not too sweet.